Discussing Tom McCarthy's book Remainder with Hugo, which I wrote about already here. As we're talking we get on to artists and Hugo's describing a conversation he had with Paola Pivi, whose extraordinary staged scenes, often involving displaced animals, or large objects or people, in relation to extreme or unexpected landscapes, he has often worked on with her (some of them are here). Paola's is the donkey in the motorboat stranded motionless on a flat sea, the helicopter overturned and rested on its rotorblades, the pair of zebras stood in the mountainous snow, the alligators turned and swirling in lakes of cream. H. says that sometime ago Paola wondered aloud to him if, aside from the demands of having to make tangible work, she might prefer not to photograph these scenes at all - confirming in the end that she'd rather just stage them as events; to organise the logistics, make things happen and then simply sit back to watch.
I wondered since about the difference between the compulsion to write something into existence and the compulsion to actually make something happen. Perhaps there isn't so much difference as one might think, at least if you believe what Burroughs wrote in The Adding Machine, where he sees writing as kind of magical or political practice that makes things happen in consciousness, in order to see those same things made manifest at some future point; that "thepurpose of writing", he says "is to make things happen".
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Somehow related (I think).
In Berlin at the weekend during the artists talk/discussion at HKDW, William Pope L. said something like this (any error caused by my slow typing):
"I guess I'm interested in making interventions inside people's heads.
Kind of like neuroscience for theatre. That would be good you know - to build a sculpture actually inside peoples consciousness... and then do shit in there."
(Works best if you can imagine the ironic (?) mad-scientist glee with which William laughed after saying this).
All ok here apart from a couple of hours in a and e on Friday. A chain of
events, pick, concrete, eye, concrete. Bleeding eye. Nice. N was only asking
for a story with bleeding eyes the other day (true) so I came home and he
got a live one. All ok but v sore and I look like a terminator abt to be
mashed, or mid mashed. Light is a problem at the moment.
Meanwhile, in post Apocalypse Liverpool:
I'm a Nogadog, me. I've been one for four years and I'm 17 now. I thought it was a good thing when I was young. It was all my mates. You are just a Nogzy soldier. We are all Nogzy soldiers.
Beautiful Robert Smithson drawing at the amazing Ubuweb. Also nice list-work from Bruce McLean and the John Baldessari as proto-Bart above. I am going to lose myself in there sometime when I get near a decent connection (see below).
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I am stood in the narrow part of the hotel room, right up by the door, with the laptop raised above shoulder height and turned at a slight angle in order to catch the ghost of the fucking wifi signal that haunts this annex. I have resorted to this only in desperation after the previous tactic of shifting position slightly on the bed for fifteen minute periods failed to find the tiny pocket of signal that sometimes can be found there, tangled in the sheets. If you get this message please come and get me. I am in room 133.
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From the train, coming here, days ago.
The kid I can’t see who's sat behind us says:
But you cant be scared, because it is your voice.
And then later:
Mum can’t turn her voice into your voice.
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Vlatka is getting ready for her eight-hour performance This Here and That There at HKDW in Berlin, this Friday. I am helping her prepare which means for the most part I am sitting in the sun and watching her. Sometimes, with the stop watch on my phone, I have to time how long it takes for her to shift the 50 chairs into a new arrangement. The tech guy is great but he's reluctant to believe that she wants to move the chairs all around the building on her own - he has someone that can help her. Vlatka says no; her shifting the chairs is the piece. He says OK, but he adds that there's someone scheduled to be there - so its really OK for her to change her mind.
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